Cheapest/Best Portable Net plan for Xbox Live?

October 20, 2006 3:48 PM

Barring signal strength for a location or normal lag issues, what which plan is cheapest for portable Internet (Clearw're, Xanadoo, etc) service that I can laglessly play Xbox Live with?

There's different plans for different speeds -- what speed, other than blindly choosing the highest, would be sufficient? Anyone have any experience with these providers (preferably Xanadoo for non-contract options) who play XBL?

posted by vanoakenfold to computers & internet (3 comments total)

This is going to depend a lot on your location. If you know someone with these services near you, try them out in person. I haven't tried these types of wireless services before - but our business is served by a direct point-to-point wireless ISP, and even that isn't very good as far as lag goes. I would expect far less performance from a consumer-grade connection.
posted by odinsdream at 6:27 PM on October 20, 2006

There's a new gaming-only ISP that's been making the rounds of the blogosphere. It's called GameRail and is free right now because it's in beta, and is PC only FOR NOW, but they hope to support consoles. They are fiber optic and only for games and they hope to do away with lag. They say when they launch that it will be less than $15 a month.

I don't mean to sound like a shill... I just know some people are excited about this. And it'll help people who read this in the future, if not you.
posted by IndigoRain at 12:41 AM on October 21, 2006

Speakeasy bills themselves as gaming-friendly, but they don't have wireless. From my experience with wireless ISPs and microwave/Wifi links, the latency will be very, very high, even if the speed is good.
posted by wzcx at 8:42 AM on October 21, 2006